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Why BLACKBERRY is Just What Canadian Cinema Needs

I’m proud to say that I was a die hard fan of Toronto-based filmmaker Matt Johnson before it was cool. From the moment I witnessed his groundbreaking debut feature The Dirties at Vancouver’s Rio Theatre in 2013, it was clear I was watching a future Canadian film legend in waiting.

Johnson proved to be no one-hit-wonder as his follow-up film Operation Avalanche brought the house down at VFF in 2016. It was enough that the film was a delightfully delirious deconstruction of the filmed moon-landing conspiracy through a millennial found-footage lens, but the post-screening Q&A worked the room of largely young film aficionados like a finely-tuned projector. Johnson’s freewheeling approach to filmmaking, largely relying on improv and using the actors’ own names to ensure spontaneity, was catnip to someone like me who was still relatively fresh out of film school.

Johnson disappeared from the big screen for a spell to focus on his now cult-favourite mockumentary series Nirvanna the Band the Show (now streaming on CBC Gem), occasionally making acting appearances in such indie fare as Diamond Tongues and Anne at 13000 ft. His theatrical return was heralded last summer, when Blackberry was announced to the public after it had already been shot!

The film is a slightly-fictionalised biopic (aren’t they all?) about the three men behind the world’s first real smartphone, the titular Blackberry. Canadian comedy mainstay Jay Baruchel is phone inventor Mike Lazaridis, It’s Always Sunny alum Glenn Howerton is company “co”-CEO Jim Balsillie, and Johnson himself fills out the trio as co-founder and eccentric engineer Douglas Fregin. The three form the nexus of “Research in Motion” (RIM), the Waterloo-based company that produced the Blackberry line.

With Jim’s business savvy paired with Mike and Doug’s technical know-how, the three launch the Blackberry into the stratosphere as the first handheld device capable of making calls and sending emails along with the then-new text messages. While the friction between the corporate drive for profits and the existing technical limitations of the the 2000s manage to produce minor miracles that keep Blackberry on top, the company faces both internal and external pressures (Steve Jobs, anyone?) that threaten to torpedo the enterprise even faster than it ascended.

Johnson tells the (mostly) true story in the same found footage style as his previous work, but no longer feels the need to justify the camera as audiences have long gotten used to the format. He structures the rise and fall of RIM in three sharply-plotted acts (and one coda) that deftly detail the struggles that result when innovative genius gets into bed with big business. The three lead characters are sharply defined and clash as much as the collaborate, eternally alternating poles of the magnet.

I would normally be content to do a standard movie review of a film like this (9.5/10 btw), but a recent interview with star Jay Baruchel on CBC prompted me to use this platform as a call to Canadian filmmakers and the domestic film industry at large to tell more stories like this and to tell them well. 

Canadian history hasn’t been entirely absent from the screen. I recall many a TV movie on the likes of CTV or CBC growing up that would efficiently (and cheaply) relate the histories of such Canadian figures like Jack Layton (Jack, 2013) and Terry Fox (Terry, 2005) as well as historical events like the Halifax explosion (Shattered City, 2003). But the decades of cultural and historical building blocks that make this country what it is have all too often been relegated to school textbooks where they often remain forgotten long after the required exam is completed.

As I’ve often bitterly bemoaned in the past on this site, too many Canadian producers and filmmakers are content to simply make American stories with Canadian money (The Kennedys, 2011) or to less-simply set their stories in a generic North America that could be either Canada or the US depending on audience perceptions (Orphan Black, No Clue, Schitts Creek).

I’ve been watching Canadian fictional content for years and it’s still surprising to even see a distinct Canadian cultural marker clearly represented on screen (the characters in Blackberry pass by a Shoppers Drug Mart for example), much less a story and characters that have a real sense of place above the 49th parallel.

“In English Canada, it’s something we have historically not been great at,” Baruchel says in his aforementioned interview about filmmakers telling Canadian stories. “If you go down on the street corner, all of these flashpoints in Canadian history, that in a lot of other countries would be part of the origin myth of that country, people (here) don’t know.”

I was fortunate enough to see Blackberry at a packed special preview screening in Vancouver recently and the audience loved it every step of the way. It made history come alive in a way that no other Canadian filmmaker or showrunner has been able to manage. Johnson’s gung-ho style might not work for every Canadian story, but it has the right attitude in that in the quest to engage and educate audiences, it doesn’t hurt to entertain them as well.

Blackberry opens nationally in canadian theatres on May 12

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